it will either kill me or save me
Antique shop, Petaluma, CA.
It’s been a few days since my last entry, in which I shared a wee little secret I’d been keeping to myself for a little over a week–that I am writing a book (and by the way, the response to this news? So encouraging. Everything from comments to emails to FB posts–so much love going around).
It has been a really lovely couple of days, marinating in this writing process again. I’m really glad that I gave myself some time to let the work I am doing be my own little secret, to get some momentum. I’ve written before about how it is that we can choose to let telling others be part of our work with commitment and accountability, and in this case I noticed that having started some of the work before announcing the work, I was able to make some headway. I think that had I not started this work and just announced it, first, I would have experienced more fear of the “Oh, shit, I just told people I was going to do this sort of BIG THING, and now I’m going to “have to” do it because I told everyone” variety.
So, okay. I’ve told people what I’m doing. I’ve been working myself. And now the question comes in, one that is so important for projects of any scale, though particularly so with creative projects, and that is how to handle deadlines. Deadlines will either kill you or save you. It’s all in how you hold them.
I’m thinking of getting my M.A. in writing when I’m thinking of this. I had a friend who was really a lovely writer, with the one main consistent critique of her work being that she meandered a bit too much, went on a bit too long with a passage and then lost the narrative thread of the story along the way. And it occurs to me now that perhaps some of our strengths and weaknesses in writing (or anything else) are tied up in how we handle deadlines.
This friend of mine often struck me as paralyzed around deadlines. Our fiction workshops were set up in such a way that at the beginning of a quarter a rotating schedule would be determined to see who would be presenting on a certain day. This was done so that you’d know well in advance when you had something due, and you could make the appropriate number of copies for everyone in the workshop the week prior to when you were reviewed. Then we’d take those copies home, review them, and come to the next week’s class prepared (and the next writer in rotation would be there with copies for us to take home and review).
Some people in the program wrote in big, passionate bursts–not procrastinating, but clearly following some kind of wave of creativity that would come in big and strong like water crashing onto the surf, then receding. I always leaned towards the “put a bit of time in several days a week” method. Other writers forced themselves to sit at a desk every single day, berating themselves if they missed a day. My friend tended to treat writing like it was “due,” an assignment that she needed to take care of. I can’t remember ever hearing her talk about writing just for pleasure during the two years that we were in school together, and as I look back I wonder how much I really knew her inner workings at all. But I do remember what I observed, and what I observed was that she avoided writing in the weeks leading up to when something was due. Perhaps she’d do a bit here and there. But she didn’t really, really put time in until just a few days before, and the night before, she had to bring the photocopies to class.
Then she’d show up in class with a worried look on her face, circles under her eyes, her hair clearly unwashed. And she was such a lovely person that I remember really feeling something for her in that, really having empathy for how much struggle she clearly put her tiny body through just to make that deadline. Had she felt she could drop the deadline altogether, I believe she would have. I mentioned that a common critique of her writing was that it was strong, but sometimes meandering–there were threads that went too far, things like that.
Had she had a different relationship with deadlines, would she have given herself time to see where things went to far and been able to edit them out?
This is where we get into deadlines as both friend and foe, the thing that will either kill you or save you. What kind of relationship do you have with deadlines? Do you loathe them? Are they paralyzing? And why?
As I’m working on my own book now, and I have a September deadline, I also have another deadline coming up–my own self-care vacation/hiatus. Back in October of 2009, I sat down with a 2010 Franklin Covey calendar and planned out my own Courageous Year–when I’d like to launch new things, when I’d like to hold retreats, when I’d like to take a vacation so that I could get some rest. I’ve learned over the years that my vacations are like savasanas in yoga, a space I can create between postures to completely relax and thus rejuvenate (P.S. Look for my upcoming article on this in the Courageous Conversations column at Wish Studio).
My savasana will be from June 12th-July 12th. I’ve been giving my postures (my life, my relationship, my work, my creativity) 100% of myself in these past few months, and I look forward now to just letting go in the in-between. I’m still going to be popping into the blog now and again–as someone who’s been blogging since 1998 as a labor of love, not something to do just for marketing props, I find it a perfectly fun thing to do while on vacation–but I do want to have the bulk of my workload mapped out. And I am finishing work on the Across Mediums e-book course, and adding a lot to it, and generally rocking out there.
So it’s all about how I hold the deadline. How much tension do I want to have around it? How will I hold space for meeting a goal? Will I hold it as a “have to” or a “get to”?
I think that deadlines are fantastic motivators. I know how great it feels to meet a goal, and I know that what I’ve found works for me is to create slow but steady work each day. I try not to get too caught up in the days when not a lot happens, or when I realize that after some editing, I’m cutting a substantial amount of work because it just wasn’t a fit. In the end, my ultimate deadline is to create this body of work that I look in the mirror and feel genuinely proud of, and I think that that’s what’s happening with me, with the Courageous Year e-book. I am waking up in the morning enthusiastic about something that I can put my heart behind. That feels amazing.
How do you handle deadlines? When are they helpful, and when are they not?
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